Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The

by John Lescroart

  * * * * *

  Hardy was serious about not wanting to handle any more murder cases.

  He’d never bought into the ethic of his landlord, David Freeman, a truly professional defense attorney. Hardy did it for the money; Freeman’s vision of life and the law accepted the necessity, and even the rightness, of defending bad people for heinous acts they had actually committed.

  Hardy had been a cop for a couple of years after college and a hitch in Vietnam. After that he spent a few years as a prosecutor for the district attorney’s office. When his first marriage broke up in the wake of the accidental death of his son, he took close to a dozen years off to tend bar and contemplate the universe through a haze of Guinness stout.

  Eventually, the haze lifted. He became part owner of the Little Shamrock. He married again. Frannie was the younger sister of Moses, his partner in the Shamrock. He returned to the law — again as a prosecutor.

  Office politics, not a philosophical change of heart, had driven him from the DA’s office and a benevolent fate had delivered him to defense work. He had believed in the innocence of his first two clients, and his instincts had been right.

  After that there were opportunities to get ‘not guilty’ verdicts for other clients, but this was not the same thing as the clients themselves being innocent.

  Hardy wasn’t going to defend criminals and use his glib Irish tongue to get them off on legerdemain, on legal technicalities. He did not feel any kinship with criminals, and didn’t much care what societal influences had made them go bad. He didn’t want to help keep them out of jail, even if it put bread on his table. Not that he didn’t believe that defendants were entitled to the best defense the law allowed. Personally, though, he just wasn’t going to provide it.

  So his professional life had devolved into estate planning, business contracts, litigation. Occasionally, he’d take a fee for walking a client through the administrative maze of a DUI or shoplifting charge.

  He often dreamed of dropping the pretense altogether, go back to his bar and pour drinks full-time — but that was another problem. The world was a different place than it had been before the kids.

  In those days he and Frannie felt rich. They had money in the bank. Hardy’s house was tiny but paid off. Every six months they got a profit-sharing check from the Shamrock in the five-thousand-dollar range that cleared their credit cards. He’d made some money on those first two murder cases. They’d been able to get by, comfortably, on three grand a month.

  Now they needed nearly three times that. Home insurance, medical insurance, life insurance, saving for college (assuming his kids went), the loan payment for the house addition they’d built. Food, clothing, the occasional sortie into the non-child world of restaurants and nightlife.

  He couldn’t afford to stop working at the law. Loving what you did was a luxury he couldn’t permit himself anymore. Frannie was talking about going back to work next year when Vincent started first grade. This was an issue — they both knew she’d be lucky to break even on the day care they’d need.

  Of course, there was a second option: she could go back to school in family counseling, incur another mound of debt, possibly position herself to make more money (‘In family counseling? Hardy would ask) so that in ten years…

  This was the downsized American nineties. You tightened the belt and everybody pitched in and worked all the time and maybe someday your kids would have it only a little worse than you did now.

  Hardy knew he wasn’t ever going back to his little bar where he could get by on tips. He was going to keep his nose at his desk and bill a hundred and fifty hours every month — which meant he actually worked two hundred — until he died.

  Adulthood. He was developing a theory that it might be one of the country’s leading causes of death. Someone, he thought, ought to do a study.

  Life was too short as it was. He wasn’t doing any more murder cases.

  * * * * *

  He did, however, follow Glitsky back across Bryant Street and into the familiar unpleasantness of the Hall of Justice, a huge, square, faceless, blue-gray monstrosity. Its address, seven increasingly depressing blocks south of Market, did not begin to convey the light-years of distance between the Hall and the sophisticated center of culture that it served.

  Since Hardy’s last visit the huge glass-front doors had been backed by graffitied plywood — a less-than-inspired design solution, if part of the building’s visual statement was to make the citizenry feel safe. A cattle chute led through a metal detector into the lobby.

  At the elevator banks, frothing with vulgarity, Glitsky was stopped by a young Hispanic man who started talking to him about a case. The kid seemed to be an assistant DA, as Hardy had once been. Had he been that young?

  Hardy contemplated as the elevators came and went. The DA’s office had truly undergone a sea change if this youngster had made it to prosecuting homicides already. But he was talking to Glitsky, so that’s what it had to be about. Glitsky wasn’t exactly Mr Idle Chitchat.

  Abe finally got around to introductions, pointing a finger around. ‘New guy, Eric Franco. Old guy, Dismas Hardy. Hardy doesn’t work here anymore. He’s moved on to greener pastures. Private practice. Franco’s got his first one eighty-seven’ — a murder case — ‘he’s a little nervous.’ From Glitsky this qualified as an oration.

  The doors opened. The elevator was empty. They all moved. Eric took up the patter, at Hardy. ‘You on a homicide here, talking to the lieutenant?’

  Hardy shook his head. ‘Social.’ Followed it with, ‘Hard to believe, I know.’

  The doors opened on three and Hardy nearly got out from force of habit. This was the floor for the DA’s office, where he once had worked. Glitsky and the homicide detail were on four. When the doors closed on Franco, Hardy looked over at Glitsky. ‘How old is Eric?’

  ‘I don’t know. Twenty-five, thirty?’

  ‘And he’s pulled a murder?’

  A shrug. ‘Probably a no-brainer.’

  ‘Still,’ Hardy persisted, ‘how many trials can he have done?’

  The doors opened. ‘I don’t know, Diz. I didn’t hire him. The DA hired him. You want his resumé, it’s downstairs. Check it out.’ Without looking back he led the way down the hallway to the homicide detail.

  Hardy followed, wondering how a man of Eric Franco’s age and experience could have been assigned to try a murder case in superior court and be expected to win even a no-brainer.

  ‘He’s not, is the simple answer,’ Glitsky said. ‘It’s politics.’

  Hardy was standing in the doorless cubicle Glitsky used for an office. Outside in the detail, fourteen paired desks vied for floor space in the big open room. There were a couple of structural columns poking up here and there, festooned with wanted posters and yellowing memos, joined to water coolers or coffee machines. Years before, forty square feet in the corner had been drywalled off and an ‘office’ created for the lieutenant. Some years after that the door had been removed for painting and never replaced.

  Glitsky was behind his big, cluttered desk, catching up on paperwork. He’d had no objection to Hardy coming up to the detail to talk to inspectors Sarah Evans or Marcel Lanier — the Sal Russo investigating team — if they’d let him. If they didn’t want to talk, they wouldn’t be shy about letting him know. If they did, Hardy might get a hint about what Evans had found at the old fisherman’s apartment that had set off her warning bells: Sal might not have been a suicide.

  But both inspectors had been out in the field, so Hardy went down to the bathroom, then wandered back into Glitsky’s space and asked again about the kid Franco and got told it was politics.

  ‘Losing trials is politics?’

  ‘You really ought to go down there’ — meaning the DA’s offices — ‘it’s a whole new world.’ Glitsky put down his report. ‘You’re not going to leave me alone, are you? Let me get back to my work?’

  Hardy clucked. ‘I want to. I really do. I’m trying, even.’r />
  ‘I’m confident you can do it.’ The lieutenant picked up his report again. ‘Get the door on the way out, would you?’

  David Freeman was in his trademark brown rumpled suit and wrinkled rep tie. Sitting in the low leather couch in Hardy’s office, smoking a cigar, his tattered brogues crossed over the rattan-and-glass coffee table, Freeman, the wealthy, famous landlord of the building, could have been mistaken for a destitute client. The man was retirement age or better, and sported tufts of white hair from the tops of his earlobes and eyebrows. Bald on top, round in the middle, liver spots wherever skin showed, he was still a force in the courtrooms of the city.

  ‘The reason it’s politics,’ he was saying — Hardy had worried it all the way back to his office — ‘is Sharron Pratt, our esteemed DA.’

  Hardy knew the story of the election well enough. Pratt had beaten a reasonably popular incumbent named Alan Reston the preceding November. Although Reston was a Democrat, as nearly all elected officials in San Francisco had to be, and African-American to boot — potentially an even bigger plus — he was a career prosecutor. Many people in the city, including Hardy, found it ironic that what had done in Reston, running for the job of chief law-enforcement officer in the city, was his tough stance on crime. Sure, the DA was supposed to prosecute people who’d done bad things, but Reston seemed unable to make the leap of faith that this didn’t mean they were bad people. He thought they were bad people. He thought people who committed crimes ought to be punished, and punished hard.

  Pratt, on the other hand, while she agreed that many criminals, indeed, had done bad things — murder, rape, burning kittens for Santeria rites — she did not agree that this necessarily made them bad people. They were misunderstood, surely, but she believed that with counseling and guidance, many of them could again become productive members of society.

  Also, it hadn’t helped that Reston, a black man, had been a supporter of Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative. He opposed affirmative action, believing that trial lawyers, like brain surgeons, for example, ought to be hired and retained because of their ability to do their jobs getting convictions at trial and putting criminals in jail.

  When he’d come aboard, Reston looked around the office he ran and saw that there were a lot of women, some people of color, a lot of old white guys. The job was getting done. When there were new openings, he hired the best person from a diverse pool of applicants — black, white, male, female, Asian, Hispanic — he didn’t care. Pratt did care, though. And Pratt got elected. ‘So this relates to how Eric Franco pulled a murder?’ ‘Pratt unloads all the old white guys, she’s still stuck with the cases, so to prove her theory that anybody can do this work, she hires her quotas and willy-nilly assigns the cases, and her people lose and it doesn’t matter. Eventually they might win.’ Freeman raised his shoulders expansively. ‘Who knows, it could happen. Almost everything happens sometimes.’

  * * * * *

  After he threw out Freeman, Hardy realized he’d blown nearly the whole day on Graham Russo’s problems, satisfying his own curiosity, catching up with the bureaucracy, city politics. He shouldn’t have done it — he couldn’t really spare the time — but somehow it had gotten inside him.

  But the piper would have to be paid.

  Hardy did not work within the organization of David Freeman & Associates, but Freeman’s overload was keeping him afloat. His life over the past six months had been dominated by a contractor’s liability lawsuit with the Port of Oakland over the failure of a loading transom. A container-load of personal computers — ten tons and over $18 million worth — fell sixty-some feet before glancing off the deck of the ship that was to take the computers to Singapore for distribution to the Asian market then sank into the bay. The accident had caused over $5 million in additional damages to the ship and, of course, delayed delivery of everything else on board.

  As tended to happen, the lawsuits proliferated. The Port of Oakland was contending that the computer hardware manufacturing company — Tryptech — had overloaded its container. That had caused the transom’s failure. Other shippers who’d lost revenue on their own deliverables were lining up to sue both Tryptech and the Port. One of the workmen who’d been on deck at the time was claiming that he’d wrenched his back trying to avoid flying metal. He was seeking over a million dollars from one of the parties, whichever might be found at fault.

  In the normal course of events a private practitioner like Hardy would never find himself involved in any of these lawsuits. The various litigants’ insurance carriers would slug it out through their mega-law firms and eventually somebody would settle or win and the attorneys would make a lot of money regardless.

  But in this case Tryptech’s insurance carrier had refused to pay for its loss of computers because it had come to the conclusion that Tryptech had misrepresented the number of units in its transom. So the company’s president, a silver-haired Los Altos smoothie named Dyson Brunei, had come to David Freeman. He needed his own personal lawyer representing his own interests outside of the insurance chain.

  There was a potentially large settlement down the road, he believed, and Freeman stood to collect a third of it. Deciding that Brunei’s lawsuit against the Port had reasonable merit, Freeman accepted the case on a contingency basis plus expenses, and had farmed it out to Hardy, paying him by the hour.

  It was a good fit all around.

  So Hardy spent the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening crunching numbers. Now Tryptech seemed to be playing a game with him, its own attorney, on the number of computers that had actually been in the container, which was still sitting under forty-five feet of water at Pier 17 in Oakland. It was beginning to appear to him that his clients had, in fact, overloaded their container.

  But Tryptech would contend — and Hardy would have to argue if he wanted to keep getting paid — that this, even if true, didn’t matter because the containers still weighed far less overloaded than the threshold strength of the transom…

  And so on.

  At eight o’clock Hardy packed it in, and it was dark by the time he finally found a parking space four blocks from his house. He was going to have to tear out his beautiful, tiny front lawn one day and put in some kind of parking structure. He could see it coming, the day he’d be getting home at ten-thirty, unable to find parking within a mile of his front door.

  Instead, maybe he should give up his car. But that left the Muni, which was unthinkable. Even if the city bus system had worked, it wouldn’t fit his haphazard schedule, and it didn’t work anyway, so the point was moot. Urban living.

  Maybe they’d have to move out of the city. That was it. Cash their little place in, move to the suburbs, spend half a million dollars on a three-bedroom, two-bath, in Millbrae, be the proud owner of his own garage.

  Sighing, beat, lugging his fat lawyer’s briefcase and feeling a hundred years old, he arrived at his gate and stopped to take in the feel, the look, of his home.

  There was no denying it: he loved the place. It was the only free-standing house on a street that was otherwise crammed to the lot lines with three- and four-story apartments. He was irrationally taken with the postage-stamp lawn, the white picket fence, the little stoop where, on evenings when he had gotten home before dusk — almost never anymore — Frannie and the kids would be out waiting for him.

  Now the lights were on, inviting. He picked up the faint strains of music coming from inside, pushed open the gate.

  * * * * *

  Abe Glitsky was a surprise, sitting on his kitchen counter, carefully picking nuts out of the bowl next to him. ‘What are you doing here? You better have saved me some cashews.’

  Hardy’s wife, Frannie, came up against him — long red hair and green eyes that were shining with good humor and perhaps a little Chardonnay. She was wearing black Lycra running shorts, tennis shoes, and a green-and-white Oregon sweatshirt as she pecked at his cheek, slipped an arm around his waist. He gave her a hug and felt the qu
ick reassuring pressure of her thigh against him.

  ‘Abe was in the neighborhood with Orel,’ she said, ‘— soccer at Lincoln Park. I said I expected you any minute, he should wait. Orel’s back with the kids.’

  Hardy heard the unmistakable child noise from the back of the house. Orel was Glitsky’s youngest son — a twelve-year-old — and Hardy’s two kids — nine and seven — worshiped him. Glitsky, digging at the bottom of the nut bowl, looked up. ‘I’m afraid the cashews have vanished. I don’t know where they could have gone to.’

  ‘I asked them to stay for dinner,’ Frannie said.

  ‘He’s already had it.’ Hardy went over to the refrigerator. ‘Did he drink all my beer too?’

  Glitsky slid off the counter. ‘I don’t drink beer. In fact, I don’t drink at all.’

  Frannie was smiling at Glitsky. ‘We know you don’t drink, Abe. That’s all right. We still like you.’

  Hardy wheeled. ‘How can you like a guy who eats all your cashews?’ He opened a bottle of Sierra Nevada pale ale, took a sip, faced his friend. ‘So what’s up?’

  As though they’d been discussing it all along, Glitsky reported, ‘We got the autopsy back on Sal. I thought you’d want to hear. Strout’s going with homicide/suicide equivocal.’

  Frannie didn’t like how this sounded. She put her wineglass on the counter and crossed her arms in front of her. ‘What’s this? What homicide?’

  ‘Just a case,’ Glitsky said, getting a pained glance from Hardy for his troubles.

  ‘Abe’s,’ Hardy said. ‘Not mine.’

  ‘That’s funny.’ Frannie wasn’t buying it. ‘It seemed like it had something to do with you.’

  ‘No. A client of mine, that’s all. His dad. Estate case.’

  ‘And that’s why Abe was telling you about it? Abe the homicide cop?’

  Hardy had another pull of his beer. He shrugged. ‘One of life’s little coincidences. My client’s dad. It looked like he killed himself, but maybe somebody else did it. Doesn’t have anything to do with my client, necessarily. Right, Abe?’